


when you find the bodies, bring them up

by snagov



Category: Discworld - Terry Pratchett
Genre: Angst, Desperation, Love Confessions, M/M, Misery, Pining, Post-Book: Night Watch (Discworld), Sybil ships it, Time Travel Repercussions, no one here is well-adjusted
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-01
Updated: 2020-06-01
Packaged: 2021-03-03 00:53:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,793
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24486172
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/snagov/pseuds/snagov
Summary: We're used to tremors. To having the Earth shudder under our feet, always falling back into place. Never something to worry about. Sam Vimes has been ignoring the way the ground shivers.Havelock Vetinari knows that someday the eruption will come
Relationships: Havelock Vetinari/Samuel Vimes
Comments: 15
Kudos: 98





	when you find the bodies, bring them up

_Don’t be me, please don’t be me,  
_ _says the adult, looking back into wormhole  
_ _as if jumping into foxhole._

\- brenda shaughnessy

  
  
  


It goes like this.

Havelock Vetinari sleeps at midnight and wakes at four o’clock. He takes the world in over black coffee and two slices of wheat toast, each precisely buttered on one side. The world is printed in rags. News reports and papers, whispers and _you-didn’t-hear-this-from-mes._ There are some exercises and ablutions, his dark clothing laid out upon his narrow bed. (Each outfit much the same as the last.)

There is a perception in Ankh-Morpork that the Patrician seems timeless. Endless and immortal, preternaturally aware and ever-watchful. To Ankh-Morpork, there is no sense in hiding from an omniscient Patrician. No, he sees everything anyway and sees your enemies’ secrets too. _It’s better that way,_ the city says, _keeps thieving honest._ But Vetinari is not timeless. Not immortal. His joints ache in the morning. His hair, long and spider-black, is shot through with iron at the temples. He is still tall, still narrow as a broomstick, still with a silent assassin’s step, yet his skinny-fingered hands have sunspots now. His knuckles are knobby and gnarled, dusted with a fine black bit of hair. His eyes are pale and blue, his brow constantly arched in sardonic amusement. But there are lines at the corners now and around the fine mouth. 

He has grown older. As we all have, as we all must. Here he is again, on another morning, just the same as the one before, daring to eat a peach and measuring out his life by coffeespoons. On Tuesday afternoons, he takes tea with Lady Ramkin. Sybil will, invariably by the end of the visit, set her cup gently down upon her saucer and ask softly, _"Has Sam - anything at all? Yet?"_

The answer is always _no._

Now, sitting at his desk reading and rereading reports, he is waiting with a tapping foot. Waiting for Drumknott to catch the Commander on his warpath, burning the city to the sea in his wake. Waiting to hear Sam Vimes ushered in, bluster and blushed fury on his cheekbones, his sharp, straight nose, knots tied by the wind in his hair. 

Sam Vimes will blow in like a storm through dry grass and scatter the reports to the ground.

And Havelock Vetinari loves him.

He doesn't know who to pray to. The gods make slaves of us all. 

* * *

It also goes like this.

We'll visit somewhere else. Another world, it doesn't matter which one. In Herculaneum, the Romans talked and drank and killed the Son of God. The earth had always boiled over there, sloshing about at their feet. They were used to having the soil tremble beneath them. Suetonius tells us that the Earth shook while Nero sang; that the stadium waited until he was done to fall.

We never thought to worry; the pressure kept building on. We had named the city for our hero, swinging his club and popping his gum. Keeping one eye on Atlas, trying to drop the world, to give it away. Later, we would ask if Heracles had failed us. If he had traded the apples for the world. 

(Had it been too much? Had he given in? Gotten tired? Had he dropped us?)

In the year 79, there were four days of tremors. Dishes fell to the floor. Bottles rattled. Teeth too. We don't dig up the bones in their graves to see how they've kept on, but they clatter about in their little boxes too, shaken like dice. 

We had rolled snake eyes. Struck out. (Rotten luck.)

We should have listened. Vesuvius called out to us, shook us by the arm, said _listen, look. I am coming. I will come from the sky and I will come over land. I will blanket you in your homes, in your streets. I will burn you, hold you in place, make a memory of you. When men come, thousands of years later, they will ask 'but why didn't they run?'_

_What will I tell them? What should I say?_

* * *

The lilacs are blooming now. 

Havelock can smell them, thickly laid upon the air, coating the spring with their scent. The smell makes him sick, reminding him of Cable Street. The metallic scent of blood smeared across a wood table, soaked into a woven rope. On the stones of the floor, spilling out under the door. (The only thing to get out.) It makes his stomach twist and his throat tighten, yet his face is perfectly still and he wears the lilac anyway, set carefully into his buttonhole.

It is the twenty-fifth of May.  
Thursday.   
Nine p.m.  
_Knock knock._

He hears, rather than sees, Vimes clatter in from the opened door. Heavy boots, tracking in dried mud. Nothing new. Nothing unusual. Havelock does not look up from writing. (An agenda for the upcoming quarterly board meeting. It is detailed right down to the moment when Mandrake McGinty will be gently encouraged to leave the meeting by two trolls with strong hands and _very_ big clubs.) 

"Fine, look, I'm _here_ ," Vimes hisses. "What do you want?"

One dark brow arches like an aqueduct. _What do I want? Everything. Nothing. I want you in my bed. I want to hear I love you from your lungs, even if I have to steal the air myself. I want to wake up with you on Sunday mornings, split a peach for breakfast. Honey in your tea. I'll offer you a pomegranate seed, just the one. Make you a Devil's deal, just to keep you one night a week._

"I rather think that is _my_ question to ask you, Commander. As I don't believe our next meeting is until Thursday?" He looks up now, taking in the scowl on Vimes' face, the well-dug ditch between his brows. 

"It's May twenty-fifth," Vimes says, as if that might explain everything. (In fact, it does.) "And you _didn't_ tell me I have an appointment with you."

Havelock raises his brow further still. "You do not."

 _"Exactly,"_ Vimes spits, leaning heavily over the edge of the desk, his hands firmly planted on the surface. "That's my _point._ That's not - That's - " Vimes shoves off from the desk. One hand in his sandy hair, pacing in frustrated circles. "Look, that's not what you - and I - _do._ Today." Spit flies in his vehemence, speckling his lower lip. Havelock tries not to stare, caught in mild surprise at the fury. 

The silence between them is as large as an ocean. There is space enough for them both and for the Holy Spirit too. Finally, Havelock breathes in, measured and paced, and speaks in a quiet voice. "Then pray tell me, Commander, what it is, exactly, that we _do_."

Vimes stares at him. His hair now wild as brambles, his eyes disbelieving and wide.

Havelock doesn't move. He stares back, waiting for the staccato fire of Vimes' questions. For that is what they _do._ Give and take, bait and bite. The Patrician turns the fire up to high and Commander Vimes boils over. Something is different today. He holds his pen tightly, the metal pressing sharply into the pad of his hand. His eyes, blue as hypoxia, dig into Vimes himself.

The smell of lilac is thick in the room. Havelock feels like a man raised from the dead.

The stillness beats on. The isochronal tick of a clock keeping time. 

“I hate the smell of lilacs,” Vimes suddenly grits out, his jaw tense. There is one of his own pinned to his chest. Thirty lilacs for thirty years. 

“As do I.”

(He hates a lot of things. The smell of lilacs. Walking down Cable Street. The word _particular._ He never mentions it.) 

Vimes breathes heavily. His face is lined. His jaw is square and unshaven. His deep-set eyes narrow while he stares down the Patrician.

 _What are you to me?_ Havelock understands, as a purely intellectual exercise, what had happened when Samuel Vimes had chased Carcer through one side of time and come out as John Keel on another. Havelock Vetinari _understands,_ yes. He considers it in the way he considers art, stretched out and hung up upon a wall. Something to look at and dip into, to live in for a moment and then walk away from again. There is a timeline in which Havelock had never met Sam Vimes until they were both adults, Patrician and thin-soled copper. That is Vimes' timeline, twisted up here and nestled alongside. 

It is not Havelock Vetinari's.

His is a different thread. The fabric of his time is stretched out, as dark as the night sky, as mutable as shades of grey. Remember the past. When the revolution had come, when the Glorious Twenty-Fifth of May had come, smelling of blood (and lilacs too), he had been nothing more than a skinny boy. A whiplash shadow in loose, dark clothing. His black hair had hung long and unkempt around the sides of his sharp-boned face. His chin as pointed as an accusation. His narrow fingers like lockpicks. 

Seventeen years old. An apprentice of the Assassins Guild. At seventeen, with his deft hands as the key to the city and his mind drunk on cleverness, he could have gone a lot of ways. Perhaps, in fact, he would have if John Keel had not appeared with grey at his temple and exhaustion balanced on his brow.

He had broken into Keel's room once, looking for something. More information. More closeness. An answer to the puzzle that was one John Keel of Pseudopolis, a peculiar Sergeant-at-Arms. Keel had caught him, had picked him out of the shadows with the ease of a sniper. 

“Get out of there,” Keel had said, sitting at his desk and idly picking stones out of the rubber sole of his boot with a pocketknife. “You’re making the spiders nervous.”

Havelock had moved out from behind the patched, mildewed curtains. His pulse had clamored then (as it does now), unaccustomed to being caught. He remembers standing in the rented room and facing Keel. Keel had looked at him for a long moment with something like sadness. (Havelock had troubled over that; he had not understood it then.)

“You might as well arrest me," Havelock had said. _Arrest me. Drag me in, throw me into a jailcell with bars like teeth._

Keel had looked him up and down with an even stare, as if sizing up a new copper. Fresh meat for the hungry mouth of the city. “No.”

“Why not?” Havelock asked. His eyes had been wide and burning then. The hottest part of a flame is blue and he had caught fire. He had wanted to linger here, in Keel’s room. Ask him who he is and where he had come from. Ask him why the world seemed strange when Havelock looked at him, as if the earth were heavier there. As if the gravity grew denser around Keel, drawing him in.

 _Why?_ he had asked. He had wanted to be special. (He still does. It is mortifying. He never speaks of it.)

“You’re a kid.”

“With a crossbow.” 

Keel shrugged. “Would’ve missed.” 

“I would not,” Havelock says. He presses the issue, uncertain why. I’m breaking and entering.”

“You had an appointment with me. You’re invited.”

Havelock frowned. “I did not.”

“Sure, you did,” Keel said, grinning like a devil with an inside joke. “I just hadn’t told you yet.”

Havelock had moved with an Assassin's shift. Thin and angular, bending to fit the shadows. Shape without form; shade without color. He walked forward. Eyes usually slip away from him, losing him in their slack focus. Not with Keel. “You’re not from Pseudopolis, are you?”

“No.” Keel’s eyes had held his. Never gave an inch.

“Is your name John Keel?”

“No.”

“Tell me.” Why does he have the right to ask? (He didn’t then. He doesn’t now. He doesn’t expect an answer.) 

“No.” (He didn’t get one.) 

Keel's eyes had been set. Firm and strange. Havelock had found himself, like any seventeen-year-old boy, grateful for loose clothing. His grasping fingers had wanted to reach out, to polish their rough edges on Keel's stubble. To pull Keel's square jaw down and to learn what it meant to be kissed. 

He had never been kissed then. He did not know. Havelock Vetinari had stood there like a fool, pale eyes and dark hair. Look at him, a ruin in black and blue.

There had been nothing in the set of Keel's shoulders, nothing in the set of his mouth that invited this. So Havelock did not. He will keep the memory instead and pull it out like a favorite book, a beloved photograph. Even now, in his narrow bed, in his small grey room, he will find the file cabinet in his memory marked Samuel Vimes. He will go back, back, further back, to this knotted mess of spacetime where he had been young once and in love. In his little bed, rarely visited, with the only hair on his pillow as his own, he will pull out his furious cock and gasp in a quiet voice. The denizens of Ankh-Morpork imagine the glacier-cut Patrician as untouchable and separate. A little marble, some machine. 

_You’re always wrong about me._

I will tell you the dullest of secrets. He is only a man. A man with a dyspeptic stomach and an ache in the spine. A man with hair on his knuckles and bitten cuticles too. His coarse, black hair spills out across the grey pillow like a knocked-over bottle of carbon ink, writing his confession in for him. His cock aches. Leaks. He rarely reaches for it, rarely indulges himself. _I want to be better than this. I don't want to need this, to be tied to this body, locked here, as base and simple as anyone. I don't want to want you. (To need you. To need anything. Never that.)_ Look at him, just human after all, his pajama bottoms shoved down around his knees, his nightshirt hiked up his chest. His cock in his tight and flying hand, slick with his own pent-up ache, already spilling out and _god it's been weeks, do you have any idea how I need this? How I want you? What I think about when I'm alone with myself and there's no one, finally no one, to watch me stumble? Look at me, making a mess in my own bed, thinking of the anger on your face, the way you stepped close to me and raised your jaw. You shouldn't get that close, stand within six inches. Shouldn't raise your face like that, your chin in defiance. Don't you know what you're doing? (You could have been kissed.)_

He comes on his own fist, as he always does. Look at him, a sweat-soaked ruin, falling apart in his own bed.

_Pathetic._

* * *

There is no way to drill for a volcano. You cannot hide under your desk, cannot put a book over your head. You cannot fetch the iodine from the basement, worrying about your neck. If the eruption is coming, you get out of town. 

Clickity-clack. Don't look back. 

Throw blankets in the car. Bottled water. Batteries for the flashlight. A generator and bandages. How far should we go? Where should we go? Anywhere but here. The ground is shaking and we are tied to it by gravity’s relentless pull, scrambling for cover. 

The eruption had lasted for two days. It was just after lunch when the ash had started to fall like burning rain. Pumice like hail. A cloud of tephra like a freight train. The pyroclastic flows could eat a man alive and spit out only the bones. By the time you see the cloud coming, it’s already too late. You’re already dead.

Sit still then. Hurry up and wait. The end of the world comes for everyone. When Atlas drops the ball, Hades catches it in steady hands.

 _“Sorry about the mess,”_ Hades will say, telling us to beware the dog, to not mind the water on the floor. It drips from the ceiling, it seeps from the river. _“I keep meaning to clean up.”_

* * *

Lord Vetinari was born in the fall to order. He believes in order and logic. In practical and reasonable methodologies and explanations. Yet, he, like any other man, must suffer the condition of having A Beginning. Of having come from somewhere, of being a child once. His mother had been superstitious, so he carries a few superstitions under his belt. Vimes draws close to him, his eyes set on a low simmer, and Havelock crosses his fingers in his pocket.

To the observer, it would look like nothing at all.

He would like to be something more than human. But he is only human. Ankh-Morpork chatters on, assuming that everything they see of the Patrician is everything there is to know. As if he is only an extension of the city itself, a black-robed gargoyle of the Oblong Office. A permanent fixture, made for the civic machine. He listens to the gossip, the idle words, the whispers about where he goes and when and what he owes them for daring to take the lead once. For being heard once. Sometimes, he is mildly amused. Sometimes, he wants to scream.

(Only human, after all.) 

"Who are you here to see, Commander?" He asks, lifting his sharp jaw high. "The Patrician?" A dark brow arches like a cat, wary and elegant.

Vimes' eyes are the color of earth and just as shaken. Just as terrifying. "You," he finally says, giving up the ghost. 

When Havelock speaks, his voice is quiet and half-erased. "And who am I?" _To you? Tonight? Who have you come to see? The Patrician in his office? The man in his home?_

"Someone I've known a long time," Vimes says, dropping the words like a penny in the well. "Thirty years. Someone who was there." 

Silence is stronger in stone rooms with stone floors. It echoes off the walls, the corners. There are few places for the silence to be swallowed up. In the absence, it is only breath that can be heard. _So,_ he wants to say, _what took you so long?_ Vimes' nostrils flare. His mouth shifts. Havelock stands as perfectly still as a blank line, waiting to be written upon. 

“What can I do for you, Commander?” The quiet infects his words.

"I don't - " Sam says, taken to shifting from hip to hip, foot to foot. His restlessness caught within him. It makes Havelock uneasy just to watch. “I don’t know.”

"I know." Still quiet. There's a strength to steadiness, to not changing your tune. Don't show your hand. 

"Sybil said - " Sam starts and then stops. The light catches in his hair. Light brown. Like a paper bag, a piece of twine. The sand at the bottom of a river. The bark of a tree. His eyes are a shifting hazel that Havelock has never quite pinned down. A kaleidoscope of blue and green and brown and gold. (When Havelock looks around the city, he finds every shade of Sam’s eyes.) 

Havelock nods. His long hair falling forward like night. 

_(Sybil said a lot of things. She kissed you and you ate mutton and boiled potatoes. The salt was still on your lips, the butterfat still melting on your tongue as she said "Have you told Lord Vetinari yet? That you love him? Oh, don't look surprised, dear. Hearts aren't so small as all that. Yours is big enough for two.")_

"I know." He doesn't, yet he does. Havelock closes his eyes so that he might not see Vimes' chest rise and fall, might not see his mouth, as red as an apple (held out for a bite). _What would you taste like? An apple, the first apple. Saltwater. If you bit your lip, you would bleed and taste like a knife._ This near to him, Havelock can smell the other man. The ozone of petrichor, the hint of salt-heavy sweat and the metallic tang of a steel sword. Dirt on his boots, something of cedar near his skin. 

Havelock does not know his own smell, so he hangs back, calculating the possibilities (afraid of the worst). Cotton, perhaps. Yes, grey cotton sheets, growing bare of thread. Soap. The tar-like scent of his simple carbolic soap. It could be the vetiver oil for his beard, the tea in his mouth. The dust of his shedding skin, the sweat of his neck. Is it good enough? (Should he move away?) 

He is sweating. His groin tense. 

_Do you want this? Me? It's the oldest story in the book, isn't it?_ The first of all things. We woke up once, somewhere in that distant and unrecordable past, and taught ourselves how to touch. Here, on the little carpet before his desk, they stand only six inches apart. Once, Havelock had wanted to bring Sam's jaw down for a kiss. Now, the taller of the two, he wants to will his hand to rise and bring that jaw up to his mouth. He shakes in his own skin. Seismic tremors. He is terrified. Sam looks terrified. Afraid of a kiss. (Afraid they will not be kissed again.)

 _You could leave. I could pull away. The tremors will settle (nothing will change)._ Sam could back up, shut the door behind himself. Havelock could go to bed in the dark and wake up in the dark. His hand on his middle-aged belly, the black hair of his chest, his fingers grazing himself, the tip of his miserable hardness. He would get by. He could. He has all this time.

He is waiting, watching Sam breathe. Watching Sam lick his lips. 

_What are you waiting for?_

Someone moves first. Havelock will never know if he had failed and leaned in, finally pressing his mouth to Sam’s. He will never know if Sam had been the first to cross that divide, that Rubicon of nothingness, taking Havelock’s thin shoulders between his strong hands and gasping into gently parted lips. 

It is not a brutal kiss. He has always imagined violence. If they should give in, pop the cork on thirty years of pressure, they would be a volcano. In some, the lava moves slowly. In some, we can move out of the way. 

The kiss comes tenderly and his lips feel like a bruise.

* * *

I am trying to tell you something. 

Are you listening? Do you have one ear on the ground? Here, lend me your ear. The earth is coming apart beneath our hands. Watch. The deeper we dig, the further we fall. God forgive me. God forgive us. 

When you find our bones in the rubble, bring them up.

* * *

It is dark in Havelock’s bedroom.

They do not need names here. Not here, just the two. Just you, just me. Me and you. The floorboards creak as they step on them, stumbling over here. The metal of Sam’s belt buckle clatters upon the floor as it falls. 

“Do you want the light?” Havelock asks. (He is used to the dark.)

Sam nods his head, flicks the switch. “I want to see you.” In the soft chiaroscuro, Sam’s chin looks still more square, the lines around his eyes deeper yet. 

A flush covers Havelock’s neck, his chest. It is blotchy. He loathes it. He is forty-nine years old, he should not be betrayed by his body like this. But he is, so he turns away. The room is warm. The bed is narrow, made of untreated pine. His blankets are always shades of grey. The walls are grey. The dresser is bare but for a little glass of water and an upside-down book, marked with a torn bit of newspaper. He tells himself he lives sparsely. But look here, look carefully. Havelock is a monk, sequestering himself away. Making himself inhuman and untouchable. Here, he must sleep. Must eat. Must be human and a man, so he makes a monastery of his bedroom and a punishment of his bed.

Sam looks around and says nothing. Havelock wants to say _sorry about the mess_ but there is nothing to blame. _Sorry_ sits like a chickenbone in his throat and it has nowhere to go. _Sorry that you came, that this was coming. That it’s only me._

The light is low and the shadows are kind. Sam puts out a hand and touches the side of his face. Everyone believes that the Patrician is afraid of nothing. They are wrong. Everyone is always wrong about him. Havelock Vetinari is afraid of everything and, still, with a frozen glance, he faces it all.

A kiss. Simple enough. They have done that already. The whiskers at his own stubbled cheek, his aquiline nose pressed into Sam’s, their breath quick and teeth knocking. 

“Shall I?” He reaches for his collar buttons, murmuring into Sam’s mouth, wondering if it is his own voice or a borrowed one. It sounds strange. Rough. He does not recognize it. 

“Yeah,” Sam whispers. _“Please.”_

So he works his reluctant shirt from his back, his trousers from his legs. The dark waves of fabric gone, dropped to the floor like everything else. He has nothing to hide behind but his hair. Sam sheds his own clothing and pushes that bleak hair to the side. The light catches in Havelock’s drowning-blue eyes. 

_Are you certain?_ He wants to ask (doesn’t ask). Instead, he gestures to the bed. “After you.” 

Sam rolls his eyes and takes them both down together.

Now, here he is, naked in his own bed. Sam's unwrapped body curling around his own. Disbelief on his tongue, the roof of his mouth. He feels timeless. Immortal. Thousands of years ago, back in the dawn of history, humans fucked just like this. We don't know the names of their gods, the color of their hair. There had been no City Watch then, no Oblong Office. These little window dressings are immaterial in the material fact of their bodies. We have always fucked like this. Hands, legs, shoulders, mouths. Fitting into each other and trying to make a star.

“How?” Sam asks, his voice a shipwreck. His rough fingers closed around Havelock, allowing himself to be guided. To be taught. _Yes, like that. Just like that._

“Like that.”

"Can you?” _Can you, like this? Will you, like this, held within the palm of my hand?_

“Yes,” Havelock gasps, his voice snuffed out in his own throat. He is used to giving. To doing and anticipating, to carving out little pockets for himself just to get by. He has never learned to ask (not without mortification). He has learned to do everything himself, to set all the rules, just so he might never have to ask.

Sam's broad grip tightens in Havelock's black hair, kissing his mouth in supplication. They are both begging. Both asking. They fuck like a prayer.

 _"Yes,"_ he hisses, his eyes slammed shut and white light drowning the world. White explodes behind his eyes, he shatters into Sam’s steady pulse of a hand. The white falls like ash, like a racing cloud. His mouth frozen wide and screaming silently into his own fist.

After, they lie in the rubble of his sheets. Havelock’s arm found under Sam’s shoulder, Sam’s fingers trailing along Havelock’s gooseflesh side. 

“Truth or dare," Sam whispers, brushing dark hair from Havelock's face.

“Truth.”

"Can you read minds?"

Havelock laughs. "No." He looks at Sam, serious now. He is pale against the bedsheets, an apology of a body. Skinny and strange, shaped like a steak knife and just as sharp. His hair is a study in black. The color of a word crossed out in ink. It falls across his shoulders. "I believe, as the saying goes, that turnabout is fair play. Your turn."

"Truth," Sam says, grinning.

Havelock catches him in a blue stare. “How many times have you been in love?” He asks. It's a fair question.

"Twice," Sam says, after a pause. "Just twice. With Sybil and - "

 _And._ Havelock breathes in, staying very still. "How did it end?"

Sam kisses him and doesn't answer the question. _Say it, say it, say it._ (It is strange. Havelock Vetinari knows everything. He knows there's arsenic in the candles. He knows how to pick his own locks. He can walk over the hill, there to the little graveyard, and see the plot he had purchased. He knows where his bones will lie, deep in the earth after he is gone. But he does not know if he is loved.)

Yes, Havelock could take a different door, if one existed. He wouldn't mind washing up with Sam next to him, seeing the beard stubble fall like ash into the porcelain sink. Close your eyes. Let the yarn of an entire world spin out before you. It could be different. There could be two chairs at the table, Sam's breastplate in the closet. Havelock would save Sam's favorite sections in the newspaper, take the dog for a walk. 

Loss is strange. Most wounds wait to hurt until the injury occurs. Loss aches from the start. I _met you, knowing that, one day, I won’t have you._ So Havelock reaches for nothing at all. 

The morning will come as all catastrophes do, whether you want it to or not.

* * *

_You: Is it worth it? Love?_

_Me: Always._

Find our bodies, bring them up. Frozen in time, my bones interlocked into your own, cast into stone by ash. Where do I end and you begin? Ask the atoms, it doesn’t matter. It’s never mattered. How will we come back? After Vesuvius and Chernobyl, after the Black Death invades our bones? After the bombs fall and the churches crumble? How do we rebuild after the ruin? We always do. We flow back, come back. Build cities on top of lost ones, give them new names and new ports on the same rivers. 

Build me a city, call it Byzantium. Build me a city, call it Istanbul. You’ll find us buried under the same sky. 

In Herculaneum, it took a few centuries to rebuild. Before hesitant hands reached out and touched the lava like a door handle in a fire, making sure it might be cool enough to touch. But the ground was cold and the sky was clear, we founded medieval Resina in the middle of it all. Yes, time moves on and we grow back. We keep one eye on the mountain now. 

The archaeologists will be careful. They will mark off the map of our apocalypse by even squares, each carefully numbered. They will sift through the dirt, find us with the coins and shattered pottery. Just another story in the mud.

When we speak of the surface, in the future when they find us, Hades will pause and turn. 

_“Is it so bad down here?”_ And it will mean _“Is this okay? Do you love me? Sorry about the mess.”_

* * *

“Truth or dare," Sam asks, his hand on the door. It is near midnight, the sky is black and spattered with stars. He must be leaving. 

“Truth,” Havelock picks. (We always believe this to be the easier option. We are always wrong.) 

“Have you ever been in love?” 

_I have._ "Yes," Havelock says, his eyes like blueshift. He keeps to his desk. He wears black, severe and impassive. Lord Vetinari, his face cut from stone and his glacial glance. "Once." 

"How did it end?" Sam stands at the door. Commander Vimes in his boots, his shirt. His stick firmly at his side. A copper of the city. They both are held by Ankh-Morpork, they know where they belong. Havelock looks up from his desk, papers settling around him. Ink waiting to be drawn, letters waiting to be written. A crossword is pinned beneath his pointed elbow, half-solved in a glance. Sam is watching him, his eyes wide.

_How did it end? (Here we go round the slippery slope.)_

Havelock looks at him. Sam looks back. (Tender as a bruise.) 

"It hasn't."

I want to give you a word. A gift. A something to take with you. Love is a useless word. A too-wide brush. Let’s go to the details. Let me write you a love poem of non-definitive acts: A black coat, the pale cream poured into coffee. Sunlight on stone streets. Branches like fingertips, trees reaching in supplication. The thin pages of _Anna Karenina_. The timbre of his mother’s voice and yours too. An orange, peeled slowly to see. The car you drove at sixteen, the bucket seats. The wisteria at the window of your attic room, my hands climbing your hair. _Rapunzel, Rapunzel!_ The world shifts and shakes, rattling apart on a beast with four shelled backs. This little car, this dark parking lot. Where are we? Have we slept? Who is coming to take us apart? Who is shaking the car? Earth and her hands? 

Feel it rattle.

They’re going to tip us over. Hold on to me. Give me your hand.

* * *

_Give me a happy ending._

Like this. What have I been telling you? Yes, it goes like this.

Lord Vetinari has black hair and bony hands. Havelock reads at a speed of four times the average person. He crosses his ankles under the desk. He goes to bed hungry. He rules his city with his careful fist. Everything in its place. Everything in its time. And he loves Sam Vimes. This is a list of incontrovertible facts. (They are correct, they must be. I looked them up, found them in a book.) The curtain. Now falls the curtain. When Hades falls in love, he shakes the ground. He stands there, clad in black, offering the pomegranate like an apology. _I’m sorry for my kingdom,_ he says, _no one else would take it._

An hour later, Drumknott knocks upon the door. 

“Yes?” He pinches his mouth, keeping it shut. 

“Commander Vimes would like to know if you will remember to keep your appointment with him next week. On Thursday at nine p.m. Also,” Drumknott shifts slightly, “Lady Ramkin said to send her love.”

“Yes, Drumknott,” Havelock Vetinari says, signing his signature at the bottom of a report. He dips the fountain pen in a jar of black ink. “I believe I will.” 

Sam will come next week. And the one after. 

_“What are you afraid of?”_ Hades asks, with a hand held out. 

Look around. The sky is white. The stars are white. The river runs deep and the grass is green. It is summer now. Summer always. _What have I been afraid of?_

Here we are then, at last, in Kingdom Come.

**Author's Note:**

> Uploaded and removed previously, if you have seen it before.


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